Technicians of the Sacred: Ethnopoetics and the New Indigenous Poetries

Poet, translator and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg explores the early history of ethnopoetics.

This video discusses the Screen Studies components of a Screen and Cultural Studies Major at the University of Melbourne.

Coinciding with the publication of an expanded 50th anniversary edition of his anthology Technicians of the Sacred, poet, translator and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg will explore the early history of ethnopoetics.

Drawing from the new introduction to the book, he will begin the talk discussing the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of ethnopoetics as a collaborative work of poets and scholars to which he was a close witness and active participant. He will then propose a link to the survival and revival of many indigenous languages and poetries in the early 21st century, with a sense that change rather than stasis has been at the heart of these poetries as well as of our own.